9/11 is one of those days everyone remembers. We all know where we were and what we were doing when we found out that disaster had struck. The Muslim terrorists not only struck the Twin Towers in New York, they struck against Western civilization and every one of us.
I also remember where I was on that day. I was in Warsaw when my worried father called. He said that war had broken out and that someone may have attacked the United States. That was how it had looked, after all, when no one knew the details.
Later, we all watched our TV screens in disbelief — fire trucks, terrified people, the planes crashing into WTC and the Pentagon. Two giant towers came crashing down, then nothing but clouds of ash and debris remained. People were crying and screaming as they raced for their lives, while firefighters went blind from the dust. Finally, a few days later, President George Bush, standing at the ruins, promised the terrorists that America would respond swiftly.
Following these events were documentary movies and news reports, and with them, the whole story’s chilling details emerged. Among these was a shocking memoir released in the form of a book — the memoir of a firefighter who had saved people inside one of the towers.
Finally, Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had probably most aptly and powerfully defined what we all thought and felt, first in her work “The Rage and the Pride” and then in “The Force of Reason”. She stated that we had been wounded but were simultaneously threatened by something else — that we as Westerners had lost our instinct for self-preservation.
She warned that Islam would devour us. Not through the use of bombs, grenades, or planes crashing into towers or explosions in metros, but through demographics. This was confirmed to her by one Muslim. Muslims would simply enter Europe, give birth to children and wait 10 years, 20, even 30…as much as they need to wait until there are more of them than us. And then, thanks to our system of democracy, they will easily take over.
Islam will win because we are weak, and we are destroying our own roots. We are negating the achievements of Christian civilization. We are making it easy for Muslims to overwhelm us.
In this context, Fallaci, an atheist who “does not believe in God but believes in Christianity”, resounds more powerfully than the voices of conservative and Catholic commentators who are weeping over the fall of the West.
One autumn, I decided to travel to New York. Fate wanted to me to visit the city at the same time it was experiencing Hurricane Sandy. Just prior to the hurricane devastating the streets and drowning the city in over a week of darkness, I managed to visit the WTC memorial: two basins in place of the towers’ foundations. Water constantly pours down the sides of the basins and disappears in the depths of the black wells at the bottom. It is as if the doors to hell were located somewhere down there – as if our tears were pouring down along with the water.
Hopefully, the murderers of the victims of 9/11 will drown in those tears for all eternity. Hopefully, our current political positions won’t mean their deaths were in vain.
